ments Lab at the Georgia Institute of
Technology. MacIntyre says his current work in AR is driven mainly by
the desire to understand how to create
compelling AR experiences, interfaces, and tools. To that end, he and his
team build games and study them, focusing on everything from interactiv-ity and visualization techniques to the
feel of game mechanics to the social
experiences they foster.

“I’m very driven to create tools and
platforms that will give a broad range
of people the ability to experiment
with the technology,” says MacIntyre.
“Just as we didn’t know what the Web
would be used for until people with
real problem- and design-driven goals
started trying to create applications,
the same will be true for AR.”

tightly Registered aR Games
For now, MacIntyre is focusing on
what he calls tightly registered AR
games, in which the graphics appear to be locked onto the real world.
In the ARhrrrr! game, for example,
a handheld device’s graphics are
aligned with the physical game board
using an image tracker to determine
where the camera on the handheld
is located, relative to the board. The
system pulls video from the camera,
runs it through a vision library, and
returns an estimate about the game

board’s relative position. Using that
information, the handheld draws
graphics in the camera’s view of the
board. Those graphics remain locked
in place over a wide range of movement by the player.

“We found that if the graphics areunambiguously aligned with featuresin the world, game players treat thecombined physical-virtual view asone merged space,” he says. “As a re-sult, they can refer to virtual contentsmoothly and unambiguously, andcan collaborate or compete as theywould on a physical board game.”MacIntyre says the biggest chal-lenge he faces is with the limitationsof the vision-based tracking technol-ogy that signals to the phone whatthe camera’s relation is to the world.“We are constantly struggling withthe tension between what we wantthe games to do and what is tech-nically possible to know about theworld and to track and interact with,”he says. Because accuracy is directlyrelated to the quality of the inputs,MacIntyre and his team use vision-based tracking technology insteadof less-accurate alternatives such ashandheld-based GPS, compass, andaccelerometer sensors, which mightwork for large-scale AR applicationsbut lack the precision needed fortightly registered games.

EmploymentU.S.’s Bright CS Job Forecast

The job outlook for U.s.
college students majoring
in computer science is very
favorable, according to The
Market For Computing Careers,
a report by Joel adams, a
professor of computer science
at Calvin College. adam’s report
contains an analysis of data
from the U.s. bureau of Labor
statistics, Computing research
association’s Taulbee survey,
and U. S. News & World Report.

“The U.s. bureau ofLabor statistics predicts thatcomputing will be one ofthe fastest-growing U.s. jobmarkets in science, technology,engineering, and mathematics(s TeM) for the foreseeablefuture,” according to the report,with “nearly three out of fournew science or engineeringjobs in the U.s. going to bein computing.” of these newcomputing jobs, 27% will be insoftware engineering, 21% incomputing networking, and 10%in systems analysis.

Meanwhile, as fewer
students enter Cs, the salaries
for software engineers, network
administrators, and systems
analysts “are climbing.”
according to U.S. News & World
Report, the median salary for a
software engineer ranged from
$85,000-$92,000 in 2008, with
the best-paid 10% of software
engineers earning more than
$136,000.

“i think the most surprisingthing [in the report] is that theU.s. bureau of Labor statistics isprojecting more than four timesas many new jobs in computingthan in all the traditional (non-software) engineering areascombined,” adams said inan email interview. “a secondsurprise was their projection ofmore than twice as many newcomputing jobs per year thanthere are computing graduatesat present. The third surprisewas that computing is the onlys TeM discipline where thedemand for graduates outstripsthe supply.